Calloway Manor ....
Joseph S. Powell, III
wasn't too terrible, it did have it's drawbacks...
For one thing, the neighbor behind my apartment (apt 1b) was a guy who owned
a trailor, and had a dog in his backyard which barked constantly at night!
The outside wall of my townhouse-style apartment seemd to be leaning and had
a slight crack in it (although I did drop by to take a look at the outside
back in the summer of 2001 and it still seemed intact...
I originally had moved into apartment #9, which unfortunately was
Continued below...
in the section where the rent was based on your pay - in other words, that
little one-bedroom ended up costing me more than a 2-bedroom townhouse
(presumably because I was military and made too much, so they charged me
more to make up for the other people who lived there who were on welfare or
something...).
So, I talked to the manager & I moved across the street to apt 1b, the 2-br
townhouse (had to move myself, and it took a while - during which time the
toilet stopped flushing - this was right after I had gone #2 in it, and
before they could fix it the management brought around some prospective
renters to check the 1-br place out....before I could warn them, they looked
in the bathroom to see the unflushed toilet and exclaimed, "Good God...".
Well, excuse the heck out of me, it wasn't MY fault the toilet wasn't
maintained properly, I had only been there about a month and it had just
broken and management had not yet fixed it, what do you expect me to do,
clean it out with my hands and throw it in the garbage?!?!?
Needless to say, I was embarassed for something that wasn't my fault -
EVERYONE goes # 2 in the toilet, alright?
Management should have fixed it right away.
Anyway, the townhouse wasn't so bad, except for the FIRE ANTS.....
Apparently during the summer of 93, they irrigated the grass, which drove
thousands of the little stinging buggers into my apartment...these things
crawled in the walls and up through the area where the walls meet the
floors....I first noticed it downstairs, when, right in front of my couch, I
saw something glistening and gleaming....thousands of fire ants!
I quickly drove down to the Walmart and purchased some industrial-strength
bug-killer and did away with the evil things, and vaccumed up their
carcasses.
This may have deterred them from my living room, but not from my upstairs
bedroom - that's right, they climbed up to the second story...I slept days
back then - and onto my bed,and I woke up with a line of those things
crawling ON ME!!!!
The bug-killer spray once again did it's job, and regular sprayings kept
them away, but what can you really say about an apartment in which FIRE ANTS
find their way to the second-story bedroom and get up on your bed (to be
fair it was against the wall) and crawl on you in your sleep????
Ahh, my Callaway Manor days, many long hours spent in dark depression, eased
only by the daily dose of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
All that being said, I did have my HBO/Cinemax package (loved to watch
obscure horror flicks such as Subspecies 2 and Seedpeople) and I often
played games on my Commodore Amiga computer that were copied from a friend
from work (who happened to live in Aztec Villa).
All that being said, there were a couple of times in which I seriously
considered commiting suicide in my apartment...(wonder if anyone had ever
actually killed themselves in Calloway Manor?)....I was very lonely and that
whole time of the nineties seemed very dark and depressing to me.
At least there were some decent fast-food restaurants very closeby, not to
mention the Jr Food store (or whatever it was called) which usually stayed
open 24/7 - I remember one late night I dropped by to grab a soda, some
Dolly Madison coconut donuts, and maybe a comic book or gun magazine, when
this drunken bum was hanging out, bothering the lady who worked there...
It was a cold night, so I decided to take him home to his
even-more-rundown-than-mine apartments....
There was also this one video store, owned by Vietnamese, and whenever you
would enter the store, you'd be hit with an overwhelming aroma of insence
(smelled a little like grapes..).....
I would often rent horror films there...it seems everything in this section
of P.C. near Tyndall was semi-geared toward inducing dark depression....damn
I was lonely there, wish that stupid Gorbachev had been bumped off so that
the Cold War would have continued, as I was much happier at my base in
England, but because of the stupid Perestoika Deception they shut it down
right after hundreds of millions of dollars worth of updgrades to the
runways and the housing.....stupid Gorbachev!
I guess I can't say that I'm sorry in the least for all those diarrhea
stains from my cat that I was unable to remove from the floor - a kind of
unintentional revenge, even if I didn't get back my paltry deposit!
Something that I do find humorous, though, is that my Dad married this evil
woman who had a son from a previous marriage, and he later joined the Air
Force and around 2000-2001 or so rented an apartment in the very same
complex.....I never did find out if it was the one I had occupied in the
early 90's, but it would have been very funny if it had been.
I hope they've fixed many of these things which I have described in this
review, and if so, it shouldn't be a very bad place to live right now,
especially with an APPLEBEES within walking distance........if you do move
to Calloway Manor, don't forget to visit the little Vietnamese mom & pop
video store in that plaza off 98 across sort of across from Food World, and
kind of near the drivers liscense place - once you smell that insence,
you'll know you're there!
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It's surprising how much things can change in so short a time period - back
when I lived in Calloway Manor apts (92-94) I had a co-worker who lived in
Aztec Villa (actually two of my co-workers lived there - Steve and
Nichelle - Nichelle was named after her famous second cousin, Nichelle
Nichols, who had played Lt. Uhura on the original Star Trek..).
Oftentimes I'd hang at Steve's apt, as he would frequently pay for the pizza
and, of course, he had tons and tons of video games on both his SNES and his
Commodore Amiga computer (and he had copied many Amiga games for my Amiga
computer, most of which I still have..).
Steve's place at Aztec Villa was pretty darn roomy, and of course it was a
flat apartment as opposed to my townhouse apt at Calloway Manor.
It seemed at the time to be a much nicer apartment than mine, and I'm sort
of surprised reading all the negative reviews on Aztec Villa that people
have written on apartmentratings.com.
Anyway, I have many other memories of my old apt 1b at Calloway Manor - for
instance, I'll never forget that glorious night in August of 1993, when I
had purchased my brand new Sony 27" tv...I had charged it on my DPP at the
BX, and it was much bigger than my 21" Sony multisystem tv that I had been
using.
I had to open the box to fit it in the hatchback of my red '91 Escort, and I
left it in there during my lunch hour (which was about 7pm, as I worked
swing shift back then..).
When I got home around 11:15, I lugged that big, beautiful TV into my
apartment 1b, and pulled out the old 21" tv and took it upstairs to my
second bedroom (which had a love seat a neighbor had given me that smelled
like cat urine - I only noticed this after I had lugged the doggone thing up
into the room, and it would have been a real pain to lug back down so I just
covered it up with towels and the smell was gone, and it was pretty
sanitary) and set it on top of my green foot-locker that I got in Saudi
during Desert Storm.
Anyway, the big, new 27" TV didn't fit in my entertainment center until I
had taken this bracket-thing off of the top front - then the TV fit great!
The TV had PIP (picture-in-picture), so after I hooked up the VCR's, etc, I
quickly turned the channel to watch the Rush Limbaugh show (only us
old-timers are elderly enough to remember when Rush had a TV show - heck, I
guess you're an oldie if you can even remember when Clinton was president!).
So, I was watching Rush while playing an old Sega game called Truxton in the
small PIP window - I was definately the Mac Daddy, whoo hoo!
I spent many hours watching Beavis and Butt-Head on that TV - it was
glorious (and still is, as it wound up with my little brother and is now at
his house, in the year 2004!!).
I remember one Saturday renting a pseudo-cheese-horror flick called Warlock
2, but I was real hungry and needed some food that would satisfy my belly
while my eyes were satisfied by the lovely Paula Marshall, so I hopped into
my red '91 Escort and got an order of twenty hot wings from a place on Hwy
98 called Wingo's - it was just on the right before you get to the bridge as
you're going toward Tyndall.
I remember, as I left Wingo's with my order, the band Ace of Base playing
"All that She Wants".
I ate those wings, and washed them down with ice cold Coca Cola...mmmmmmm.
While the Food World is extremely close to Calloway Manor, I would sometimes
prefer to use the Albertson's across from the Panama City Mall.
Albertson's used to have these really great blueberry donut holes, and I'd
dip them in milk while watching Star Trek: the Next Generation.
Another great thing about that Albertson's was that there was a Hungry
Howies pizza place right next to it - I remember this one time when I got
some pizza with some Howie Bread and dipping sauce, and I discovered that
it's really great to dip the pizza slices in the sauce - that rules!
I used to have this cat named Knuckles, he was this scraggly-looking black
cat that a neighbor gave me, and Knuckles had a bowel retention problem -
oftentimes I'd get home, and knuckles was hungry because I had forgotten to
get food the day before, but I had remembered that time and had gotten him a
can of some really cheap cat foot called Kozy Kitten - I would open the can,
and ask Knuckles, "Do you want some FOOOOOOOD, kitty?" several times,
driving him crazy until I had turned the can over and plopped it on a paper
plate for him to eat.
Later that night, Knucles would get diarrhea - those stains never did come
out of the carpet.
I had survived on nuked foods - once, I stopped at a convenience store and
got a frozen dinner - this old man saw my military ID, and asked me just how
the heck was I going to cook that?
I told him that I had a microwave, and this old coot was simply amazed that
I was able to afford one - sorry, old man, but modern military folks aren't
paid $15.00 a month like you were back when you were fightin' the
Kaiser,lol!
Sometimes I wonder if my whole Panama City experience would have been better
if I had chosen a different apartment - at the time I had never rented
(having lived in the barracks at my previous base in England) so I had just
grabbed an Apartment Finder book, probably featuring apartments ran
exclusively by CRS Management - I wish I had not limited myself!
Although I didn't want to live as far from base as Aztec Villa, I would
still have liked something a little different from Calloway Manor - perhaps
Bay Front apartments - I had heard they were a little expensive, but in
retrospect I'm sure my BAQ would have been increased enough to make up for
it - there was this one chick, a cute, dark-haired girl, who worked in
MICAP, who lived there and said it was pretty cool.
There was this other chick from ACATS who was kind of cute but was this real
freak, possibly into the occult or something, and she drove this dull grey
bomb of a car with graffiti spray-painted on it - I'm surprised the SP's let
it on base - but I'm still curious as to where she lived.
Sometimes I think, if I could go back, maybe I'd have lived at Bay Front
apts instead, and maybe I would have hooked up with that chick from MICAP.
Maybe not.
Then again, sometimes I think what if I had moved into Parkway Gardens
apts - it would have been a reallly quick drive to work, it was right by
Wingo's and Oppie's, and again it was a flat-style apartment, no doggone
stairs.
If I could go back in time I would have at least started taking classes back
then, and I could have gotten a cheap DRMO desk and maybe one of those
flourescent desk-lights, and I could have also had my little brother move
in, free of charge.
My little bro did offer to move in with me when I lived in P.C., but I
didn't take him up on it - I now realize I would have been much less lonely
with family down there, and maybe we could have had some good times instead
of me contemplating suicide like I was at that dark, depressing, lonely time
of my life.
Anyway, it could have been a whole different timeline with my and my bro
living in Parkway Gardens, me taking classes in my off-duty time and him
probably selling vaccum cleaners or something.
Plenty of hot wings would have been consumed, I can tell you that!
Rich Clark, aka Left Rev Egg Plant, ULC, CotSG
> I seriously considered commiting suicide in my apartment...
Too bad you didn't finish the job.